self

joined 2 years ago
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[–] self@awful.systems 25 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Other AI companies like Cerebras are much better, running at quite sane voltages. Ironically (or perhaps smartly), the Saudis invested in them.

it’s real bizarre you edited this in after getting upvoted by a few people

[–] self@awful.systems 118 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (54 children)

there’s this type of reply guy on fedi lately who does the “well actually querying LLMs only happens in bursts and training is much more efficient than you’d think and nvidia says their gpus are energy-efficient” thing whenever the topic comes up

and meanwhile a bunch of major companies have violated their climate pledges and say it’s due to AI, they’re planning power plants specifically for data centers expanded for the push into AI, and large GPUs are notoriously the part of a computer that consumes the most power and emits a ton of heat (which notoriously has to be cooled in a way that wastes and pollutes a fuckton of clean water)

but the companies don’t publish smoking gun energy usage statistics on LLMs and generative AI specifically so who can say

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 18 points 2 years ago

it’s very telling that 85 messages is considered a lot. your grief better resolve quick before the model loses coherency and starts digging quotes out of a plagiarized horror movie script

fuck it’s gross how one of the common use cases for LLMs is targeting vulnerable people with the hope they’ll develop a parasocial relationship with your service, so you can keep charging them forever

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Srinivasan, a former partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and former chief technology officer of Coinbase, who is allegedly based in Singapore, conducted the Q&A through a free Zoom account with a 40-minute time limit — Srinivasan left seconds before the timer hit zero.

oh that’s fucking embarrassing

e: wait, people paid to attend this shit and they couldn’t allocate the price of even one ticket to pay for zoom? that’s worse

[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 2 years ago (7 children)

oh I’m not at all surprised. part of why we ban early and often is it’s very easy for posters like that to flood threads with utter bullshit, beyond anyone’s amusement but their own, much faster than anyone can respond with anything approaching the truth (because writing truth takes time, but being a big pain in the ass fanboy for a telephone psychic takes no time at all)

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

you know, for as much poison’s been poured into my ear about how everything must be Amazon scale, there’s no way in fuck they use react for their storefront or AWS, is there? I think the only reason react is considered an Amazon-scale frontend (besides Facebook, which also has a shitty UI, though not as bad as Amazon, and notoriously uses PHP for everything) is how hard they push it as part of AWS Amplify, a toolchain they say will help you reach their scale (but from experience: it absolutely will not, it’s just a set of technologies that increase your AWS bill and perform like shit, which is why Amazon doesn’t use it for anything of value themselves)

the only case I can immediately think of of a very major site going from server rendering to react is GitHub (which used to use Ruby on Rails and Erlang, apparently) and it’s been an unmitigated disaster — none of the new features that supposedly require react are good, the performance fucking sucks now, and the thing keeps breaking (I get weird renders with broken styling every few refreshes and apparently I’m not the only one). the fucking thing even hijacks the keyboard shortcuts I use and has become an accessibility nightmare, all in the name of pointlessly turning it into a react SPA and vscode wannabe.

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I have, in a previous age, unfortunately been the first one to suggest react at work. it’s declarative! the mental model makes sense! it’s kind of like functional programming! why, Facebook is surprisingly good at CS, maybe we should look at graphql too since that seems like such a good fit for react

this venerable house, opulent and imperial, is a festering abomination. as soon as you run into any performance issues or edge cases with react (or far more quickly with graphql, where the edge cases include shit like authentication and API versioning), you’re going to start burning out developers doing the most counterintuitive bullshit ever invented to torture a development team. and react is structured such that performance issues will accumulate in web apps; it’s just a matter of time (and not even that much time) before they do.

that’s why the advice now is to dodge performance issues with server-side rendering, almost like your site should have been fucking static html in the first place, except SSR won’t fire up without a gigantic bundle of JavaScript affixed to it, and in general it’s another source of bugs and weird performance regressions that you now have to debug in two places

and for what? react’s DX is better than HTML and CSS until you hit a wall, then it’s much worse. you can get a fairly react-like set of functionality out of plain HTML with Web Components… except Web Components requires fucking JavaScript for no reason but to not threaten existing frontend frameworks (see our sister community FreeAssembly soon for the gigantic rant and JavaScript library I’m writing about this shitty situation)

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

if we keep this up, the CEO might positively mention the name of our project briefly during an all-hands, then two weeks later vastly reduce our headcount because the good job we’ve done proves we don’t need to waste money on all these developers

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I checked and they do the “well maybe it’s ok in your personal projects” bit a lot, which is very funny because the code for my personal projects usually isn’t garbage

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

fuck, this quip’s better than my seeing-red rant

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 2 years ago (4 children)

thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most

and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?

but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over

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